Failing Forward To Success!

make money online

So the other day a very rare event occurred off the coast of Cyprus. A solitary whale was sighted and you can see the video footage taken from a boat by Mr Yiorgos Evripidou. Whales are not normally seen in Cyprus waters. It is too warm for them and it is presumed that it strayed from it`s pod and got lost. Let`s hope it finds it`s way to safety, as it is certainly out of it`s comfort zone here.

Do you sometimes feel like that lost whale when you are struggling on your own to try and make an income online? I know I have sometimes felt that way.The internet is like a huge ocean and it is easy to get confused and disoriented as you search for the things that work. Not to mention all the sharks out there trying to hook you with huge promises of untold wealth at the click of a button, when in reality their intention is to bleed you dry and leave you floundering and broke!

What you need to understand is that you cannot go it alone. You need the protection & guidance of a mentor and a group of like-minded people who are going through, or have already gone through the same struggles as yourself. Only then will you get all the training and encouragement you need in order to finally see success.

I have found that mentor in Dean Holland, the CEO of iPro. Dean really cares about his clients and he has a dedicated team working with him who share his ethical approach to business.

The iPro partners are an amazing group of people who are always ready, willing & able to help you via an incredible private Facebook group, as you meet the inevitable stormy waters on your journey.

The following is the guest blog post which I submitted to be published on John Thornhill`s blog. I talked about this in my previous post called “Overcoming Procrastination”

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I have been meaning to write this blog post on procrastination to submit To John Thornhill`s blog ever since the end of March when I bought a product through his affiliate link and was given this opportunity as one of his bonuses. But guess what?…I`ve been putting it off all these months!

I regret to admit that I am one of those people that need a kick up the backside to get moving and will always find a thousand excuses to do something tomorrow (or never!) rather than today. In this particular case, the combination of a realization that my bonuses would soon expire and re-visting a video of one of John Thornhill`s epic rants were the spurs to jump start me into action!

I am actually improving… things were worse before because as I realise now, I was wallowing in complacency. You see, I had my own small business (a driving school) and also work in a hotel, here on the beautiful mediterranean island of Cyprus. Although not exactly rich, my combined incomes were enough for me and my wife to live on.

I had been dabbling in internet marketing for a few years but not really taking it very seriously. Like most newbies, I have purchased a lot of products, filling up several hard drives in the process, but have rarely completed or mastered any of the courses that seemed so promising at the time I was clicking the buy button!

In 2013, the bottom fell out of our world! Suddenly, to our horror, we discovered that the Cypriot economy was collapsing. My bank, after years of throwing credit at me, suddenly froze my credit card and told me I had to pay them back what I owed them! Yikes! Worse was to come. After 15 years of having two jobs, I was told by the authorities that I could not renew my driving instructors licence because I earned more from my hotel job than my driving school. They were suddenly implementing a law dating from 1968, which had previously been ignored!

To cut a long story short, I have now had to close my driving school and that was the kick in the wallet that has motivated me to take the internet stuff more seriously. I have started a blog, after buying the domain name 5 or 6 years ago but never using it (no surprises there!) and have decided to partner with a marketer whose progress I have been following for a number of years. Dean Holland is one of the most well respected internet marketers around and I am very pleased to now be involved in his iPro membership program. Dean has an excellent team around him and the support & encouragement provided by them and the other partners through weekly webinars and a lively Facebook group is outstanding. It`s early days yet, but I have already made some sales and there are many success stories amongst the more established partners.

If you are interested in learning more about Dean Holland & how you might benefit from his vast online experience, I suggest you watch this free video where he explains his flagship product, The Big Commission Blueprint. Hopefully, watching that video will be able to motivate you, even if you too are a chronic procrastinator!

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Unfortunately, John Thornhill felt unable to publish my above post with the promotion of BCB, as he is promoting Dean`s product in other ways and felt it would be in conflict. So what I did is edit it slightly, removing all mention of BCB & Dean Holland and just leaving a link to this blog. I am happy with that, as any extra traffic to my blog is welcome and there are plenty of opportunities once here, for a reader to click through to BCB 🙂

John has just informed me that the post is live and can be found here.

So yesterday I had a phone call out of the blue from a lady with a strong Indian accent claiming to be from Microsoft Tech Support. She said that my computer had been infected and that she was going to talk me through the procedure of correcting it.

I was immediately suspicious and asked her where she was calling from. She said she was in London. There was a lot of background noise and chatter, and it sounded like she was at Victoria railway station or more likely Mumbai railway station. Anyway, I played along with her game. At one point the line went dead but she immediately called me back.

I asked her to verify that she was from Microsoft. She instructed me to open a cmd command on my computer and type “assoc” and enter. That brought up a string of characters including a CLSID. She correctly quoted the CLSID number I had on my screen and said she wouldn`t know that number if she wasn`t from Microsoft. Apparently, that CLSID is the same on all Windows computers but I can see how that would convince some people.

Next she instructed me to open another cmd command box, type “eventvwr.exe” and press enter. At this point I informed her that I don`t like being scammed and hung up! Needless to say, she did not ring back.

This is a lesson to us all about how many scam artists there are out there on and off the internet trying to steal our hard earned cash.

Every day you will come across websites that make wild promises of incredible mountains of cash that will come your way if only you buy their one click software or join their membership site. Whilst some of these shiny objects may not be out and out scams like the one being run by the Vinda Losers, most of them just do not work. They will happily take your money and leave you high and dry.

That is why you should go with something & somebody that is well established, has an excellent record of honest, ethical marketing and who really has your best interests at heart.

Introducing Dean Holland, the founder & CEO of iPro.Dean has been helping complete newbies to start making money online for years now.His reputation for producing products that deliver on their promises is second to none.

iPro`s flagship program is called The Big Commission Blueprint and it is literally transforming lives.

I urge you to watch a free video where Dean will walk you through BCB and show you real examples of ordinary people, with no previous marketing experience who are now earning big commissions on the internet. This is no scam. It is a real business that will require some honest hard work and commitment from you, which will reward you big time.

That is something the Vinda Losers of this world will never understand.

Woke up the other day to a peculiar hazy yellow sky which got steadily worse throughout the day! The normal strong sunshine and bright blue mediterranean sky were completely obscured by this fog of dust.

It was difficult to see where you were and where you were headed!

If you dared to venture out in it you would soon be coughing and spluttering and stumbling aimlessly.

Got me thinking about running an online business.

For most people starting out it`s similar to being in a sand storm.

Not knowing which direction to head in.

Not seeing the bigger picture.

Choking in the IM desert

Being constantly attacked and robbed by bands of guru bandits!

But wait!…… There is an oasis close at hand.

A place where you can see a clear path to success ahead.

Where your efforts will soon start to earn you big commission coconuts!

For the cost of a cheap meal you can start to partner with Dean and begin to get the mentoring you need to take you to the next level!

Big Commission Blueprint is taking complete newbies and turning them into successful marketers in record time!

Even if you decide this is not for you, you are sure to get real value from watching Dean`s FREE video!

One word of warning:- Don`t expect wild promises of push button riches. This is a real business which you have to work at to achieve success. If you are looking for that “three clicks and you are a millionaire!” garbage, then look elsewhere.

I have recently been doing some pruning of my aweber lists. By that I mean that every so often I go through each list and unsubscribe anyone who has not opened one of my emails in the last 6 months. It is fairly frustrating to see how many people only open the first message which has a link to the freebie that they subscribed for. Suprisingly, some people don`t even open that first message!

I have started to tweak my messages, changing headlines and wording, trying to make them more eye-catching, in an attempt to improve the open rate. After all, there`s no point in crafting & sending messages if nobody even opens them.

Here is an example of a recent message I added to my follow up sequence. Any comments welcomed 🙂

Why do we go to restaurants?

Have you ever asked yourself that question?

So why do we go to restaurants? I mean, it`s cheaper to cook at home and eat in the privacy & comfort of home, right?And yet we like to get in the car, drive around looking for a restaurant and a parking space. Sometimes we even have to stand around waiting for a table to be free!

The reason for this odd behavior?

It`s because of the appeal of the “done for you option”!

You get to feel special, waited on by experts, served up food prepared by professionals.

And all you have to do is sit back and enjoy your meal!

It`s the same with an internet business.

You can slave away at home in front of your computer, learning about HTML, CSS, FTP,SEO, copy writing, squeeze page design, product creation, email follow ups, etc, etc and even after years of trying to master all this techy stuff – there`s still no guarantee that you will make any money!

Or…

You can take the sensible option…Shortcut your success by teaming up with a well respected internet millionaire who`s been there, done that and got the t-shirt!

Just plug in to his tried & tested systems and let the experts do their thing!

It`s not quite as hands off as eating in a restaurant – you will have to do some work to promote your links and send traffic to them, but you will have expert training & guidance to help you – and you can be up and running in minutes, not years!

Back in March I purchased a product through the affiliate link of John Thornhill, as he was offering some great bonuses. These included a promotional tweet on his two twitter accounts, a banner ad on one of his sites for 6 months plus a guest post on his blog! It seemed too good an opportunity to miss. The product I purchased, Covert Commissions is good, but it was the traffic bonuses that swayed me.

Thing is, I`ve been putting things off, finding all kinds of excuses like “what could I possibly post about on John Thornhill`s blog?”

In the last week or so I have been feeling guilty because the 6 month deadline for claiming those bonuses is nearly up and I was annoyed with myself that I could be letting this chance of free targeted traffic slip by.

At this point I re-watched some video rants that John Thornhill has posted on his blog from time to time and this helped me to get motivated!

So, I sat down at my computer and forced myself to write a blog post about… wait for it……procrastination and motivation!

Once I got started, the damn thing more or less wrote itself! It took me less than 45 minutes to write the post and the tweet, prepare the banner and send them off for approval.

I am hoping that finally conquering this self-imposed hurdle will reap rewards in the weeks and months to come in the form of extra traffic to my blog & BCB link. If nothing else, I feel better for having taken action! 🙂

It has been incredibly hot & and humid these last couple of weeks and therefore not exactly ideal for doing any kind of work! However, I do have some progress to report……

My latest solo ad, which was a three parter, has now completed. The second & third parts gave me 220 clicks each and netted me 58 & 69 subscribers respectively. I also got two Big Commission Blueprint front-end sales 🙂 I also had a sale of The Affiliate Club a day after the solo ad finished!

I have joined two more banner sites, MyTrafficSite & Traffic&Sales4Me which are sister sites to InstantBanners4Me, which I mentioned in a previous blog post. These three sites are owned by marketer Frank Salinas and it is in fact his traffic that was sent to this last 3 part solo ad.

I have upgraded in both these two new sites aswell, which saves a lot of time clicking on ads to collect points & gets me better commissions on any upgraded referrals.

I also grabbed Frank Salinas “Back To School” offer which comprised of a 120 click solo ad, a 100 click banner ad on his download & thank you pages, 3 lifetime banner ads on each of his above mentioned banner sites plus 12 months of e-mail follow-ups where he will place my e-mail swipe into his autoresponder and leave it there for a year! This deal was too good to refuse, and I am confident that this will result in lots more traffic to my BCB link and hopefully some sales too!

P.S. If you are looking for a place to get great stock images click on the thermometer image at the top of this post for an 83% discount at Graphic Stock which is where I get most of my images. 🙂

I have been promoting Clickmagick since I started using it myself a few months ago. Apart from using banner ads like this one on various download pages, I have also used text ads on Giveaway Events and have also promoted this excellent track clicker software with CashBlurbs.com. In June, 2 people that clicked on one of my links took up the 14 day free trial offer that Clickmagick has in place. Low & behold both of those people decided to purchase a year`s subscription at the end of their 2 week trial! A good result, as each one earned me a commission of $51.45 🙂

I have set up another solo ad for Big Commission Blueprint. This one is a three parter (3 x 200 clicks). The first part has now concluded with a total of 220 clicks bringing me another 58 subscribers and 2 front-end sales! Part two will be going out this week so I hope to get similar or better results with that!

My newest traffic source: Instantbanners4me is coming along nicely. Apart from the extra clicks on my banner ads, I have 6 people signed up under me on that site, who may upgrade at a later stage, netting me a commission.

I have not been able to solve the mystery of why my ads for the nifty Clickbank analytics tool CB Surge are no longer getting me any sign-ups, The number has been stuck on 55 for weeks now, whereas before I was getting an average of 1 sign-up every other day. Strange. If anyone reading this would like to click on my link and sign up to test it is still working, I would be most grateful 🙂